A bulky file of horrors, in truth! Here a goatherd was taken; there it
was an old woman gathering sticks in the jungle, or children playing
in the village street, or maybe girls going down to the river for
water, laughing joyously, unaware of the great green eyes that watched
them through the towering stalks of elephant-grass; and last among the
victims came some desperate young men who had faced one of the
creatures with fish-spears.
[Illustration: "FIRST A MAGNIFICENT YELLOW HEAD EMERGES, THEN THE
LONG, LITHE BODY"]
It was a difficult country of limitless forest, broken in places by
low hills and by bare sites of the typical village of India. And
apparently from all quarters came the same report, with little
modification. Here is a specimen:
[Illustration: HOWDAH ELEPHANT TRAINING MADE EASY
HE IS FED WITH "GOOR" OR CRUDE SUGAR BEFORE STARTING ON THE TIGER
HUNT]
"As I rode into camp at Bussavanpur to-day, I was met by trackers who
told me the death wail was 'up' in the village. They brought to me a
woman with three small children. Her husband was the latest victim.
With tearless Hindu apathy she told her story, and I gave her five
rupees. She had to spend half this, according to caste usage, because
it was said to be the devil in her that had led the yellow devil to
him. The formalities over, she was admitted to the villages of her
caste, and then took me to the tragic scene. A solitary tamarind-tree
grew on some rocks near the village; no jungle within three hundred
yards; a few bushes on the rock crevices. And close by ran the broad
cattle-track into the village. The man had been following the cattle
home in the evening, and must have stopped to knock down some
tamarinds with his stick; for this last, with his black blanket and
skin cap, still lay where he was seized. Evidently the tigress had
hidden in the rocks, and was upon him in one bound. Dragging her
victim to the edge of a rocky plateau, she leaped down into a field
and there killed him. The spot was marked by a pool of dried blood. I
walked for two hours with the trackers, hoping to come on some traces
of the brute or her mate, but without success."
And so on. Some of the deaths were horrible by reason of the eery
silence that marked them, others because of the mysterious movements
or amazing cunning of the tigers. The comic episodes it were not
seemly to dwell upon. But fifty-seven! Nothing for it now but a hurry
call to the Commissioner and the Maharaja for elephants and an army of
tiger-hunters, a mobilization of the best _shikaris_ in all India, for
a regular campaign against these beasts.
In fourteen days that army was on the spot, and I enlisted under the
banner of Colonel Howe of the Tenth Hussars. The staff was made up of
_shikaris_, and the beaters were of the rank and file. Maps were
called for and studied, scouts sent far and wide into the theater of
operations; native reports were sifted and their exaggerations
discounted with the skill of long practice.
[Illustration: LAST WALL OF DEFENSE